(USA) Staff, Software Engineer
About The Position
The Staff Software Engineer is a technical leader responsible for setting architectural direction across multiple teams, resolving complex and ambiguous technical problems, and raising engineering standards. The role operates with significant autonomy and partners with Directors, Principal Engineers, and Product leadership to deliver business roadmaps while mentoring Senior Engineers. The position is part of Walmart's globally distributed Fulfillment Engineering team, which builds and operates Warehouse Management Systems for the expanding U.S. eCommerce Fulfillment Center network. The team's cloud-first, distributed-systems platform supports High Velocity and Next Generation Automated Fulfillment Centers, as well as Walmart Fulfillment Services. The engineer owns architecture and technical roadmaps for a critical platform domain, leads the development of highly available Java-based distributed systems, and drives architecture decisions and operational excellence across teams. The role also includes modernizing systems, reducing technical debt, mentoring engineers, and translating complex business problems into executable technical plans.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of software engineering experience or equivalent depth, preferably in Java, with increasing technical scope and impact.
- Expert-level experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, and enterprise-scale messaging systems such as Kafka.
- Deep hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL datastores, including schema and data-model decisions affecting downstream consumers.
- Proven ownership of production systems at scale, including reliability strategy, complex cross-service incident diagnosis, and performance tuning.
- Exceptional system-design skills and experience architecting solutions used by multiple teams.
- Experience mentoring Senior Engineers and influencing technical direction across teams in fast-paced Agile environments.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including presenting architecture and designs to senior technical and business stakeholders.
- Ability to use AI tooling or agents to accelerate development, troubleshooting, and team-wide productivity.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or a related area and 4 years of software engineering or related experience; or 6 years of software engineering or related experience.
Nice To Haves
- Deep Azure experience, including Cosmos DB at scale, and Kafka expertise across high-throughput, multi-team systems.
- A track record of designing and operating enterprise distributed systems with documented tradeoffs involving availability, consistency, latency, and cost.
- Strong supply chain or fulfillment domain expertise, including WMS, WES, or fulfillment center operations.
- Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or a related area and 2 years of software engineering or related experience.
- Knowledge of inclusive digital experiences, WCAG 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and digital accessibility best practices.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical architecture and roadmap for a critical platform domain spanning multiple services and teams.
- Lead the design and implementation of highly available, fault-tolerant, distributed, event-driven Java systems at Walmart scale.
- Drive cross-team architecture decisions and document tradeoffs involving availability, consistency, latency, and cost.
- Identify and address systemic reliability, scalability, and performance risks before they cause incidents.
- Establish team-wide operational excellence practices, including telemetry standards, alerting strategy, incident response frameworks, and blameless root-cause analysis.
- Lead technical-debt reduction and modernization initiatives across multiple teams and services.
- Mentor Senior Engineers and raise engineering quality through design and architecture reviews and engineering best practices.
- Partner with Product, Principal Engineers, and senior stakeholders to turn ambiguous, multi-team business problems into technical strategy and milestones.
Benefits
- Competitive pay and performance-based bonus awards.
- Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
- 401(k), stock purchase, and company-paid life insurance.
- Paid time off, including sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, bereavement leave, jury duty, and voting leave.
- Short-term and long-term disability.
- Company discounts.
- Military Leave Pay.
- Adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement.
- PTO and/or PPTO for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes.
- Live Better U education benefit, including tuition, books, and fees for eligible programs.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
